Solomon Kane Chronologies
Feb 23, 2018 8:45:06 GMT -5
Post by keith on Feb 23, 2018 8:45:06 GMT -5
I guess the "Kane Chronologies" section is the most suitable place for this bit of speculation. It's about the description of Solomon Kane as a Puritan, though REH makes it clear that he's not a typical Puritan and that his makeup contains a fair bit of the instinctive pagan, though Kane himself would have been horrified by the suggestion.
I've set Kane's birth myself in 1554, the reign of Bloody Mary, a fanatical Catholic who believed it was her duty to God and her people to bring the realm back to the Catholic faith after her father's breach with Rome. Solomon would have been a child when she died, if that's right, but he hated her memory. He says darkly in "Hawk of Basti" that she " ... harried my people like beasts of prey." Protestant exiles did flee to the continent to escape Mary and Philip's persecution. According to Thomas Fuller in his CHURCH HISTORY, the actual term "Puritan" dates from 1564, when Solomon -- again, according to me -- would have been ten.
I've also assumed the "little Devon town" where he was born was Salcombe. Now most of the common folk of Devon were Catholics with little interest in the theology of Luther and Calvin. Some of the gentry and quite a few nobles had Protestant leanings. I'm taking it that Hildred Taferal, who is mentioned in "The Moon of Skulls" as being an old man, was one of these even as a youth, and that he and Solomon's grandfather Reuben were mercenaries on the continent in the 1520s. Reuben, though he came of ordinary fisher-folk, was intelligent and independent-minded, and inclined to Protestant views himself from a young age, though he wasn't at all disposed to be martyred for them.
Reuben's son Nathaniel was born in 1530. Again, I've invented him, and the speculation that he foolishly got involved in Thomas Wyatt's rising against Bloody Mary in 1554, but was saved from the consequences of his folly by Reuben and Hildred. That family background, and his father's convictions, may have contributed to Solomon's Puritan fanaticism, even if it was a little before the main Puritan movement in England.
But we can be pretty sure Solomon, even if he'd lived in the following century, would have had little time for Oliver Cromwell.
I've set Kane's birth myself in 1554, the reign of Bloody Mary, a fanatical Catholic who believed it was her duty to God and her people to bring the realm back to the Catholic faith after her father's breach with Rome. Solomon would have been a child when she died, if that's right, but he hated her memory. He says darkly in "Hawk of Basti" that she " ... harried my people like beasts of prey." Protestant exiles did flee to the continent to escape Mary and Philip's persecution. According to Thomas Fuller in his CHURCH HISTORY, the actual term "Puritan" dates from 1564, when Solomon -- again, according to me -- would have been ten.
I've also assumed the "little Devon town" where he was born was Salcombe. Now most of the common folk of Devon were Catholics with little interest in the theology of Luther and Calvin. Some of the gentry and quite a few nobles had Protestant leanings. I'm taking it that Hildred Taferal, who is mentioned in "The Moon of Skulls" as being an old man, was one of these even as a youth, and that he and Solomon's grandfather Reuben were mercenaries on the continent in the 1520s. Reuben, though he came of ordinary fisher-folk, was intelligent and independent-minded, and inclined to Protestant views himself from a young age, though he wasn't at all disposed to be martyred for them.
Reuben's son Nathaniel was born in 1530. Again, I've invented him, and the speculation that he foolishly got involved in Thomas Wyatt's rising against Bloody Mary in 1554, but was saved from the consequences of his folly by Reuben and Hildred. That family background, and his father's convictions, may have contributed to Solomon's Puritan fanaticism, even if it was a little before the main Puritan movement in England.
But we can be pretty sure Solomon, even if he'd lived in the following century, would have had little time for Oliver Cromwell.